Using Windows XP's System Restore Feature (Page 2)
System restore functions, including manual creation of restore points, can be accessed via the System Restore Wizard. The wizard can be started by clicking on the Start button/menu, and then clicking on . Using it is fairly self-explanatory; you select the "Restore my computer to an earlier time" option, click the "Next" button, and a calendar pops up with a few dates in bold type. These are the dates your system has created restore points automatically, or a program installation triggered the creation of one for you.
Click on a date prior to today, and details pop up next to the calendar. You may see a "System Checkpoint", which are automatically created every few days, or maybe an "Unsigned Driver Install", which is Microsoft's way of telling you that you've installed a device driver which has not been run through Microsoft's testing (though this happens frequently, as companies don't normally like to wait to release a driver patch for a buggy driver). There are some other restore points possible, but suffice to say that any restore point is a good one if your system is badly damaged! Click the "Next" button after selecting a restore point to use, and verify you really want to perform this operation by clicking the "Next" button on the next screen. One reboot later, and your system will (hopefully) be back to it's previously perfect running order!
The amount of disk space set aside to hold restore points controls the maximum number of restore points which can be saved on a system. For most people, a set of restore points would be handy if it were for, say, a month's worth. Maybe ten different "snapshots" of your system would be good. However, XP's default is to use 6% of your hard drive. On a 10GB hard drive, that's 600MB, which isn't too much considering the benefits. BUT, on a larger drive like a 120GB, that's over 8GB set aside for System Restore!
Now, it's not immediately removed from your own useable hard drive space, but as the number of automatic restore points climb, so too does the use of that space. What a waste! Who wants to restore their system to a point four months prior? How many program updates went RIGHT in that four months which you don't want to lose?! On top of that, the more restore points you have on your system, the longer any scheduled virus scans or backups will take.
The fix is easy. Windows gives us the option to lower the amount of hard drive space used for System Restore in the System control panel, as well as the aforementioned System Restore application. We can even turn it off, which gives a small performance increase on older systems (Pentium II and III systems slower than 600MHz, etc.), but I wouldn't recommend this, as the benefits of enabling System Restore outweigh the negative aspects by a good margin. More on this later.
